Let me fill you in: I was out of office for most of this week for a little vacation. As such, I’ve got plenty of catchup to do, and pieces to read for this very email!
I’ll be keeping this section short today so I can get you all the freshest news and developments in our ecosystem.
Thanks for your patience with my brevity, and I’ll catch you back here next week for a deep dive!
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Design With Intention in Mind, Not With Fads
By Phillip Chester, Senior Web Designer, Hypha HubSpot Development
A comment from my coworker the other day made me think about design fads. We were looking at a mockup that an AI design/coding platform created and he responded with, “It definitely has an AI-created sheen to it.”
He was right. There’s a recognizable aesthetic emerging from AI design tools—inconsistent spacing between elements, rounded corners everywhere, non-branded iconography, randomized gradient accents, and interactivity without any payoff. It’s not that these elements are inherently bad. The problem is that they’re becoming the default.
This reminds me of something that happened in sports branding. The Charlotte Hornets—my favorite team—introduced a purple and teal color scheme in 1988 that became wildly successful. The look was so popular that several teams from nearly every major American sports league tried to recreate that success by adding purple and/or teal to their own brands. But the fad didn’t last. Most teams eventually switched back to their traditional aesthetics. The Hornets were the one team to stick with it, and I think that’s because they didn’t set out to create a fad. They set out to address a specific design challenge with intention.
Fashion designer Alexander Julian, who created the original Hornets jerseys, saw that NBA teams had players with diverse skin tones. He wanted a color scheme that would complement everyone on the roster, and that intentional thinking is what led him to purple and teal. The look stuck because it was rooted in thoughtful design.
This brings me back to the modern day issue. Design your brand, your site, your collateral—whatever it is—with the intention of solving the design challenges unique to your industry or organization. Don’t just apply the same AI-generated sheen as everyone else. Fads fade but thoughtful design endures.
Here’s a great, practical guide from Sheri on the importance of accessibility in your dev core. It must be baked into all areas of practice so we can make the web accessible for the over 1 billion people who live with a disability.
“It starts with leadership using the language consistently. When engineering managers and senior developers talk about a well-built feature, accessibility should be part of that description. When they talk about technical debt, inaccessible code should be on the list. Language shapes norms over time. Staff cares about what their leaders care about. If their leaders make public statements about their commitment to accessibility, developers notice. They also notice silence.”
A nice opinion piece that validates Hypha’s opinion that AI is a tool, not a replacement. Human creativity should remain paramount to our work processes, so as to not lose those skills or end up with uninspired results.
“Focusing on employees in particular, they don’t report any creative renaissance in the workplace. In fact, quite the opposite. Only 27% feel their job allows them to be creative, only 20% say their employer actively encourages them to be creative and only 18% think their company believes in creativity.
“As for AI, only 21% of employees report that AI allows them to be more creative at work. And only 37% of adults believe the new technology will have a positive effect on creative fields like music, film or books.
“This shows how far companies...still have to go to reach this much-promised Nirvana, where we all use AI to be more creative.”
Hypha Highlights
Deal velocity is a sales metric that measures how much revenue a pipeline generates per unit of time. It combines four inputs into a single formula: number of active deals, average deal value, win rate, and average sales cycle length. The formula is (Number of Deals × Average Deal Value × Win Rate) ÷ Average Sales Cycle Length, and the output is a revenue-per-day figure representing the throughput of your current pipeline. Revenue operations teams use deal velocity to diagnose pipeline health in real time, identify where the sales process is slowing down, and compare performance across segments, deal types, or sales reps.
Corporate lawyers are raising alarms about the growing use of AI note-taking tools in business meetings, warning that the verbatim transcripts they generate could expose offhand remarks and quickly corrected statements in litigation, and may even void attorney-client privilege by effectively sharing confidential conversations with a third party. While courts have not yet directly ruled on the privilege question in this context, two recent decisions involving AI chatbot transcripts have offered conflicting signals about how the law may eventually treat the issue.
Apple is reportedly planning a major Siri overhaul in iOS 27, including a standalone Siri app with text and voice modes and a new “Extensions” feature that would allow third-party AI chatbots and agents from installed apps to integrate directly with Siri, according MacRumors. The first developer beta of iOS 27 is expected in June, with a wide release to all users anticipated in September.
AI was cited as the reason for 21,490 job cuts in April, making it the leading cause of layoffs for the second consecutive month and accounting for roughly 26% of all cuts during the month, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. So far in 2026, AI has been cited for nearly 49,135 job cuts, representing about 16% of all layoff plans for the year.
OpenAI is expanding its ChatGPT ads pilot with a self-serve Ads Manager that lets businesses set budgets, upload ads, and track campaign performance, while also introducing cost-per-click bidding and rolling the program to additional countries. The company is targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year, with longer-term ambitions reportedly reaching $100 billion by 2030.
Additionally, OpenAI is bringing its Codex coding agent to the ChatGPT mobile app, allowing users to start, monitor, and steer long-running coding tasks from their phones while Codex runs on a connected laptop, Mac mini, or remote development environment.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is disrupting chip supply chains by cutting off access to critical materials including LNG, helium, sulfuric acid, and chemical solvents, putting pressure on major chipmakers like TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix that depend heavily on Middle Eastern energy imports. While most major manufacturers say they have months of inventory buffered, prices for key materials are already rising and a prolonged blockade could eventually ripple into AI infrastructure investment and data center buildout.
Related: a new Gallup survey found that seven in 10 Americans oppose having AI data centers built in their local area, with nearly half strongly opposed, citing concerns about excessive energy and water use, environmental impact, and effects on local quality of life. The level of opposition actually exceeds resistance to nuclear power plant construction, which sits at 53%, and Gallup warns the intensity of sentiment could fuel grassroots activism, legal challenges, and political consequences for officials who back data center projects.
Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI delivered closing arguments Thursday in the landmark trial over whether OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit structure betrayed its original charitable mission, with Musk’s attorney focusing on Sam Altman’s credibility and OpenAI’s lawyers arguing Musk has failed to prove any binding commitments were made. The jury’s first task is to determine whether Musk filed his lawsuit within the statute of limitations, a finding that could effectively end the case before reaching the broader questions of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.
Digg has relaunched again, this time as an AI-focused news aggregator that ranks stories based on real-time engagement data pulled from X, using sentiment analysis and signal detection to surface what’s actually driving conversation rather than relying on its own platform metrics. Founded by Kevin Rose, the site is starting with AI news and ranking the top 1,000 people, companies, and politicians in the space, with plans to expand to other topics if the concept gains traction.
“I Am Not a Robot is like a time machine trip to the very near future...Your colleague might be using ChatGPT to write emails at work, but Joanna used AI tools and robots to do household chores, to manage her health, and to transport her family on vacation. If there was a decision to make or a task to do, she let AI go first.
Along the way, she conducted exclusive interviews with the tech leaders building this future, then reported back from the front lines as your funny, no-nonsense tour guide.
Of course, tech’s sunny promises never tell the whole story, and that’s what Joanna is here to share...This book is not the definitive story, because we’re only a few years into the AI revolution. But after a year of living as a human lab rat, Joanna delivers one of the clearest—and funniest—pictures yet of what’s really happening and what it means for you.”
How can we help you?
Case Study: HubSpot Search API + Custom Objects
A roofing restoration company’s business follows the weather. Hailstorms and high winds generate waves of damaged roofs, but they had no way to know automatically which properties in their CRM had been hit. Cross-referencing weather reports doesn’t scale, and waiting for homeowners to call surrenders the conversion window. HubSpot stores addresses, not coordinates, and can’t answer “which properties are within five miles of last night’s storm?”
We built two custom objects: Property Locations and Weather Events. Each day, the integration queries a meteorological API, resolves event coordinates to property addresses, calculates bounding boxes around each property, uses HubSpot’s search API to find records whose coordinates fall inside those boundaries, and creates associations between weather events and affected properties. Weather history surfaces on each property’s sidebar automatically—28 months of events with type, date, and recency.
The result: reps open a property record and see weather history already there. Outreach calls start with specific information before the homeowner calls. Reactive to proactive.
Should your CRM respond to external events—weather, regulatory changes, permits? Contact Hypha to talk through integration architecture for your use case.
